The weekend of September 15, 2023 may well go down as the most game-breaking period in Destiny 2's long and storied history of truly MMO-grade cheese.
A newly discovered weapon crafting glitch gave players the power to apply Exotic perks and entire weapon archetypes to any craftable weapon, turning even a simple Legendary auto rifle into a shotgun-style laser that can delete bosses with ease. Embracing the chaos, Bungie recognized that it couldn't get a fix out immediately and encouraged players to have fun with the community-dubbed "funny guns" while they could – including obliterating each other in Trials of Osiris, as the weekend PvP event wasn't canceled either.
"Please refrain from asking your local Destiny 2 triage developers how their weekend was," said no-doubt weary game director Joe Blackburn.
- "A fun example of a bug becoming a feature": Destiny 2 accidentally made Exotic Glaives free to all classes, and Bungie says "we're going to let this ride"
- The Destiny 2 dev behind Titan's game-changing Banner of War was also on its new Exotic shotgun Slayer's Fang: "I gotta live up to this, especially as my first gun"
Like parents understandably taking fireworks away from out-of-control children, Bungie has since patched crafting to shut down the party. But in classic Destiny fashion, players have already found new, post-patch ways to ensure that the guns stay funny.
Beloved exploit scholar Cheese Forever has highlighted several funny guns that survived the latest patch, from bows with the fusion rifle perk Reservoir Burst to double Vorpal Weapon rocket launchers. These are considerably less powerful than the 'everything is a shotgun' creations that put the fear of god into Destiny 2's enemies over the weekend, but they're still well above the game's intended power curve.
The latest updates from the Bungie Help Twitter (X) account indicate that the crafting fixes are still ongoing, with a second fix coming to replace all the illegal perk combos. There's no doubt that the few still-burning funny guns will be stamped out before long, but having tasted true cheat codes, players are doing everything they can to keep this going.
The amazing thing about this glitch is just that it works at all. It looks comically broken right now, but the fact that Destiny 2's weapon crafting system can properly read weapon frames and apply them to entirely unintended guns with behavior that works, scales accurately, and doesn't crash the game is a real feat of engineering. Destiny 2 doesn't actually have shotgun linear fusion rifles, but apparently it could theoretically support them, and that's just cool as hell.
The process of actually crafting the funny guns was also peak Destiny 2 cheese. You had to deliberately tank your frame rate and connection in order to create a lag window big enough that you'd have time to swap from one gun to another in the crafting window and trick the game into transferring perks. I sampled the forbidden fruit myself, and in order to craft the shotgun abominations that I, along with some friends, used to delete Grandmaster Nightfalls, I opened five other games and pulled up a bunch of 4K YouTube videos. It may well have taken years off the lives of my CPU and GPU, but on the bright side, the guns were really funny.
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